Perversion and the Social Relation

Molly Anne Rothenberg is Associate of English and Co-Director of the Literature Program at Tulane University. She is a practicing psychoanalyst and the author of Re-Thinking Blake’s Textuality.Dennis A. Foster is Frensley Professor of English at Southern Methodist University. He is author of Confession and Complicity in Narrative and Sublime Enjoyment.Slavoj Žižek is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is the author of many books, and editor of Cogito and the Unconscious, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (coedited), and Tarrying with the Negative, all published by Duke University Press.

• Acknowledgments ixIntroduction. Beneath the Skin: Perversion and Social Analysis / Molly Anne Rothenberg and Dennis Foster 1Fatal West: W. S. Burrough's Perverse Destiny / Dennis Foster 15Perversion / Bruce Fink 38“I Know Well, But All the Same . . .” / Octave Mannoni 68Exotic Rituals and Family Values in Exotica / Nina Schwartz 93The Ambiguity of the Masochist Social Link / Slavoj Zizek 112Confessions of a Medieval Sodomite / James Penney 126“As If Set Free into Another Land”: Homosexuality, Rebellion, and Community in William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner / Michael P. Bibler 159Contamination's Germinations / E. L. McCallum 187Works Cited 211Contributors 217Index 219

"The only true awareness of our subjection is the awareness of the obscene, excessive pleasure (surplus enjoyment) we get from it. This is why the first gesture of liberation is not to get rid of this excessive pleasure, but to assume it actively."--Slavoj Žižek, from his chapter, "The Ambiguity of the Masochist Social Link" “[T]his work represents an intriguing attempt to rethink social functioning and relationality in the light of perversion.” - Lisa Downing (Archives of Sexual Behavior) "[A] kaleidoscopic analysis of the perverse condition within cultural, ideological and social contexts. . . . [N]ine erudite essays. . . . This anthology can be seen as a noteworthy synthesis of Lacanian and Freudian views on the logic of perversion that would be essential for any neophyte in the field of Lacanian or cultural studies. . . ." - Antonios Vadolas (Journal of Lacan Studies)